"Raise less corn and more hell!" We print shotgun journalism, use "bad grammar" whenever possible and write with a short fuse from our farm in North Jefferson County, Kansas. Our slogan: "Hayseeds and bovines, unite! Stampede the clutterfreaks! Life is short!" Email us at: bluebarnnewscentral@gmail.com

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Charles P. Pierce: "The Post Office Is Not an Other, The Post Office Is Us" @ Esquire Magazine

Great commentary from the Kansas Progressive Caucus forum about this article:

"No one is talking about the costs for Bush's stupid anthrax screening that's been dumped on the P.O. If I want to send a postcard to my neighbor, it has to go to Wichita, 65 miles away, to be screened to make sure it isn't secretly concealing a megadose of anthrax. What does the equipment, transportation, manpower cost to go through that useless exercise?

Charles Pierce is a great writer, but he doesn't talk about why this has happened. The American Legislative Exchange Council, child of the Koch brothers, and its members such as UPS (which I think just left as
a result of the recent heat ALEC has absorbed) want to privatize everything. But they don't want to see that we get our mail delivered for less. They don't want us to have mail at all unless we live in the big city where the corporations will find it more "cost effective" to continue to deliver. The hell with the rest of us."

There is a reason that post offices were once built this way. There
is a reason why, during the New Deal period alone, the country built
1100 post offices, and why it commissioned murals like "The Vineyard" to
be painted in them, and why there were marble countertops and brass
fittings and glistening woodwork. Authors Marlene Park and Gerald
Markovitz, who wrote about why post offices were built the way they
were, explained that "The New Deal sought to make the national
government's presence felt in even the smallest, most remote
communities.... The post office was 'the one concrete link between every
community of individuals and the Federal government' that functioned
'importantly in the human structure of the community.... [The post
office] brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency,
permanence, service, and even culture."

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